Inside STAT: Purdue's Richard Sackler proposed plan to play down OxyContin's risks, new documents show
THE PIKE COUNTY JUDICIAL CENTER IN PIKEVILLE, KY. (SHRADDHA CHAKRADHAR/STAT)
Just before Thanksgiving, STAT got a call that documents we had been working to unseal for the nearly four years — as part of our ongoing coverage of Purdue Pharma and its aggressive marketing of the opioid painkiller OxyContin — were finally available. Reporter Casey Ross and your Morning Rounds writer immediately traveled down to Pikeville in Eastern Kentucky to look through more than 1,000 pages of court documents. We camped out at the only Starbucks in town — at the local hospital — and when we ran short of paper clips, the woman at the hospital gift shop generously found us some.
The result is an exclusive story today that lays out what we learned: That when Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire founding family behind Purdue Pharma, was alerted to concerns about OxyContin’s potential for abuse in chronic pain patients just a year after the drug’s launch, he proposed that executives aggressively push back against these worries. The story also shows a ferociously competitive side of Sackler, who wanted to draw attention to the company’s patent infringement lawsuits so that Purdue would be “feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls.’’
In an accompanying timeline, Casey and I outline — through the emails and internal memos — Purdue’s activities in the years leading up to OxyContin’s 1996 launch, its plans to expand to the non-cancer market, and its pushback against threats to the drug’s blockbuster’s sales, even as the opioid epidemic was taking off.
The result is an exclusive story today that lays out what we learned: That when Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire founding family behind Purdue Pharma, was alerted to concerns about OxyContin’s potential for abuse in chronic pain patients just a year after the drug’s launch, he proposed that executives aggressively push back against these worries. The story also shows a ferociously competitive side of Sackler, who wanted to draw attention to the company’s patent infringement lawsuits so that Purdue would be “feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls.’’
In an accompanying timeline, Casey and I outline — through the emails and internal memos — Purdue’s activities in the years leading up to OxyContin’s 1996 launch, its plans to expand to the non-cancer market, and its pushback against threats to the drug’s blockbuster’s sales, even as the opioid epidemic was taking off.
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